February 4, 1973

The Guest WordVonnegut's Responsibility

By DORRIS LESSING

MOTHER NIGHT
By Kurt Vonnegut.

other Night" is the Vonnegut book that has not been reviewed anywhere, ever, because it was
sold first into paperback for a handy sum: he needed the money for his large family. And
paperbacks don't get reviewed, so it has been ordained. Authors always feel that readers should
know and care more about this kind of literary imperative than they do; there is more to what
makes reputations than is taught in classes on literature.

"Mother Night" is odd-man-out in another way, being a straight novel. You needn't realize this
at once or, indeed, at all; for it is a tale as monstrous as we read in the newspapers. As early as
page 4 we find an 18-year-old Jew who guards our criminal hero in a Jerusalem jail; he does not
know the name of Joseph Goebbels, but insists that Tiglath-pileser the Third, an Assyrian who
burned down Hazar (a small town in Israel) in 732, was a man remarkable enough to be
remembered by educated humanity. This sort of homely detail, instantly recognizable as the
stuff of our zaniness, transports us further than any space-time warp and does not really need the
addition of Vonnegut's elegant fantasy to make chimera land.

The criminal here is an American, Howard W. Campbell Jr., an ordinary pleasant fellow, like us
all. He was comfortably acclimatized, not being political by temperament, in Nazi Germany, but
was recruited to be a spy for Us by an agent who recognized in him a fatal sense of the dramatic:
he would never be able to resist seeing life as a battle between Good and Evil. During the war he
invented and broadcast propaganda for the Nazis, while working reliably for Us. Fifteen years
after the war, while living quietly with his memories in Greenwich Village, he was caught,
mostly because of his own feelings of guilt or puzzlement about who really had done what--a
specifically Vonnegut identification with the ambiguities of complicity.

Irrational, of course; because, judged by what he had done, he had been a very clever fellow and,
indeed, a hero; and besides, he had survived, no mean achievement these days. His thoughts--
well, they were another matter; and besides, he was no Eichmann or Calley to take orders and not
know what it was he did: "My case is different. I know when I tell a lie, am capable of
imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could
no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone."

The force of Vonnegut's questioning is such that one has to sit sown to think, to define degrees:
Vonnegut simply cannot bear what we are, of course--like a lot of writers. The growl, the wince,
the scream, that come off so many pages is due to this. But no other writer's sorrow, no other
writer's refusal to play the child's game of Goddies and Baddies, is strong enough to make me
remember, for instance, that before 1939 a great many people were shouting we should stop
Hitler, that Nazism could be stopped if America and Britain wanted to. He makes me remember-
-he rubs our noses in the results of our missed chances--that when Nazism was not stopped, but
flowered (to succumb to the associations of the word) into the expected and forecast war, how
soon our judgments became warped by the horribleness of what was going on. The horribleness
of the Nazis, of course: for almost at once Good and Evil became polarized into Us and Them
and quite forgotten was the knowledge that the war could have been prevented if our
governments had wanted. What Vonnegut deals with, always, is responsibility: Whose fault was
it all--the gas chambers, the camps, the degradations and the debasements of all our standards?
Whose? Well, ours as much as theirs.

This is so, that is, if you can believes in responsibility at all--it is here that Vonnegut is moral in
an old-fashioned way. He does take the full weight of responsibility, while more and more
people are shrugging off the we should have and we ought to have and we can
if we want and coming to see history as a puppet show and our--humanity's--slide into chaos
as beyond our prevention, our will, our choice. The strength of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., this deliberate
and self-conscious heir, derives from his refusal to succumb to this new and general feeling of
helplessness.

There is another way he is an original: for most of his career he has been in the category "space
fiction" or "science fiction" where, for the most part, the chilliness of space derives from the
writers' insistence that we do without the comforts of our own patterns of ethic, where we can so
whole galaxies crumble with less emotion than we feel pouring boiling water into an ant's nest.
Usually, in the center of Jex 132 (male) or Janni X56 (female) there is an emptiness which some
claim is the proper imaginative response to the possibilities of all-space, but which in Vonnegut's
people is filled with the emotions you and I would feel if we knew a molecule was loose that will
freeze our world solid in a breath.

Precisely because in all his work he has made nonsense of the little categories, the unnatural
divisions into "real" literature and the rest, because he is comic and sad at once, because his
painful seriousness is never solemn, Vonnegut is unique among us; and these same qualities
account for the way a few academics still try to patronize him: they cling to the categories. Of
course they do: they invented them. But so it has ever gone.

Ordinary people, with whole imaginations, reading the newspapers, the comic strips and Jane
Austen or watching the world reel by on television, keep an eye out for Ice-9 while hoping that
we are indeed recognizing the members of our karasses when they come near, try to make
sure that we don't pay more than what is due to the false karasses, and dare to believe that
while there is life, there is still life--such readers know that Vonnegut is one of the writers who
map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.

Doris Lessing's most recent book was "The Temptation of Jack Orkney and Other Stories." Her
new novel, "The Summer Before the Dark," will be published in April.